


i love the lines we draw

by letterfromathief



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Enchanted Forest, F/M, Minor Prince "Charming" James | David Nolan/Snow White | Mary Margaret Blanchard, Pirate Emma, Prince Captain Hook | Killian Jones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 12:19:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8844772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letterfromathief/pseuds/letterfromathief
Summary: She becomes many people over the years. Orphan, Girl, Slave, Pirate...she celebrates each person in ink, carries them in ink the same way she carries them inside, where no one else can see - where she is someone else entirely, just waiting to be revealed. (Pirate!Emma/Prince!Killian AU)





	

**Author's Note:**

> me as i started writing this fic: oh it's only going to be 2k, we can get this out in a day. me when it finally ended: im dead inside why is this so long.
> 
> anyways, i started writing this for cs au week but time/motivation/inspiration kept me from finishing it until now. i wanted this to just be a "pirate!emma has a lot of tattoos" fic and it spun wildly out of control into this emma-centric cs au that i think i really love??? and also will probably revisit in killian's pov??? though i definitely shouldn't because killian pov always makes me spin out of control, but anyway...i love this verse, please love it too
> 
> also the squid ink tattoo idea was 100% @blondecrowns. she's amazing, y'all should all tell her this.

**I** -

The first is not by choice. The ink burns, making her curl into herself with every pinprick of the needle - and she can’t feel that above the itching in her skin, the clawing liquid trying to break its way free again. But it’s the only way that he can keep track of them should they stray too far when they make land. Squid ink is pricey, rare, but well worth it for it doesn't fade and not even magic can remove it.

And so the first one is a black manacle around her upper arm, marking her for who she is.

 

**II** -

The second is a black ring right below the first. It isn’t of squid ink this time; it’s far too rare for her to wait around until someone tracks it down. Their escape is still fresh, and they haven’t travelled far away enough yet to be certain that they’re in the clear.

Not that she wants to travel far. She wants _them_ to know that she’s taken something they thought theirs. She smiles at the first pierce of the needle, and the tattooist grunts, “Get off on this, lass?”

She doesn’t owe him a response, just a few of the gold pieces siphoned from their former owner’s stock, but it feels like something worth voicing, “It’s a different kind of satisfaction than what you’re thinking.”

“What kind, then?” he asks.

“Freedom.”

He pauses his needle, a fold of curiosity in his brow. He touches the first mark. She prides herself on the fact that she does not flinch, the way she did the first time someone wrapped their hands around her upper arm and called out across the docks, “Here’s a slave missing her master!” The first time she was collected back into the herd of people just like her - sold and stolen away into this life. Herd - they were treated no better than cattle, but far more precious. Cattle can be sold, and he would not throw his investment away for that price.

In the end, he paid a much steeper price.

The tattooist draws his hand away from her and nods, understanding.

“Aye, freedom is a very satisfying thing.”

He returns to his work, painting a thick black line around her until its ends meet in an unbroken circle, parallel to the first, lines that would never be crossed again.

A slave she was. Who she is yet to be determined.

 

**III** -

They call her the Swan, and at first it’s said with scorn.

“Turned on the man who took care of him. Killed him with his own sword, left his body lying in a heap on the cobbles. He even took his ship.”

At first it’s said with rumor, misinformation.

_She_ was his least favorite. He told her that she should be grateful that he didn’t use the whip or starve her. Isolation was far kinder a punishment.

He was more correct than he would have liked.

Isolation left her alone with her thoughts, and her thoughts were the only place she could be free. It was this freedom that she latched on to until it was decided: she would have more than what he gave her. She would have it all.

In the dark, she planned. In the light, she executed.

Their brand prevented them not only from running away, but also from harming him. They couldn’t even touch a finger to him in anger. They couldn’t poison him or push him over the edge while working the deck in the middle of the sea and watch his sorry form drown.

The only person on their ship that could harm him was himself.

All it took was a slip when he opened the door, a quick grab for the keys and his own heavy weight pulling his stumbling form down into the dark.

She wasn’t as kind as him. It took him seconds after the door latched to curse her. A minute later to threaten her life. Her steps up to the deck, keys jangling in her hands, to swear swift and awful revenge. Her announcement to his “herd” to bellow a slow, brutal death.

An hour to try for dealing. Five hours of silence before it became pleading. There was screaming and shouting, and curses, more curses than she had ever heard said in one string of sentences. Before the end, there was crying.

It took 4 days for him to die.

She thought she would feel it when his hold over them broke. It took an hour for someone to even notice.

“Best throw his body overboard before it starts to stink,” Whale said. “And then we get as far as we can with his gold. Start our lives, free.”

She felt it then, a stirring. Tossing his body without care appealed to her pragmatism, but she looked over the railing, staring at the light shadow her body made on the water. She would never be free with him rotting away at the bottom of the sea. She’d always enjoyed the water. It calmed her when nothing else had. Fathomless, and ever-changing, free to do whatever it pleased.

It did not please her to see him resting at the bottom of it.

“No. We take him to Kingsport.”

It was just a thought, but once said it was a decision. Some gasped and started to argue. Kingsport was the busiest thoroughfare. They’d be arrested and executed the moment they docked.

She was never truly great with expressing her feelings, but she felt it - the stirring - and beyond their fear, they had to feel it, too.

“We’ll let them know that freedom always comes with a price, and they will be the ones to pay it,” she says simply.

David stepped forward, placing his hand on her shoulder. A full head taller and built far sturdier her, his voice was heard above hers, but he refused to take the lead, “Our Swan is right. What good is freedom if we’re the ones living in fear? We won’t be free until we’re free of every last one of them.”

They call her the Swan because he named her so, a nickname born of the time she used her daily slice of dry bread to feed the ones floating in the docks. Their long necks had reached up, almost coming close to touching her feet. A swan always recognizes one of its kind, he’d said. So Swan she was.

They call her the Swan, and it’s said with excitement. A bounty of gold high enough to send any all chasing after an unarmed ship of dumb slaves.

She didn’t take to the sword with skill at first. She’d seen enough matches to manage the basics, and many of the men and a few women had wielded swords before their enslavement, chosen specifically for their prowess and, thus, ability to defend their former owner.

She’d mastered the basics before they dumped his body on the docks. By the time the first bounty hunter caught up to them, she’d wielded it with enough skill to run the hunter and his men through with minor difficulty and injury. The ones that came after were just practice for her blade.

They call her the Swan, and it’s said with disbelief and laughter.

“This Swan killed four of the crews of bounty hunters on their tail? How did they even manage that?”

They say it like a joke and Emma digs her dagger into their table and replies, “Would you like to find out?”

They don’t.

The jokes end and the rumors only grow. It helps that she can back most of them up with proof. They take two merchant ships run by the same company as her slaver, and steal the galleon sent to bring her down. Before that they were a mere bounty. After, they are enemies of the crown. Whose? Many. She slips through the grasp of a host of royal ships, her new galleon managing to take down two with only minimal damage.

It’s invigorating to hear the name every time she and her crew step foot on land. “The Swan this”, “The Swan that.”

They call her the Swan. Her crew calls her Captain.

The title sticks. It suits her in a way none has before - “girl,” “orphan,” “street-rat”, “slave.”

Captain Swan she becomes. 

She finds an actual artist this time. It takes very little convincing for him to get to work. The gold helps; her reputation seals it. Its black wings spread across her back. She forgoes the traditional orange beak and has him paint it yellow instead.

He risks a question at that, and asks, “Why yellow?”

“I like yellow,” she says simply, and ends the conversation.

She stands between the two mirrors, flexes and watches the swan move with her, _one_ with her. She closes her eyes and sees those swans floating on the water, their necks reaching towards her. This time she reaches back.

A swan always recognizes one of its kind, and now she is.

 

**IV** -

The crossed swords come next.

Her crew wears their skulls and bones and anchors well, taking to the pirate life like...fish to water sounds about right. It’s easier for some, harder for others, but they all manage it with a liveliness born out of the ever-present specter of death.

David doesn’t quite take to the pirate life, but he’s always taken to her. Follows her around like a guard after a princess. It’s strange that sometimes it feels more than that, like a father after his daughter.

She brushes that feeling off, mostly.

She can’t brush off his protective nature, however, although she does try. Still, he’s never too far out of reach. Her favorite shadow, if she’s being truthful.

It’s curiosity rather than protectiveness that has him following her now. He’s never gone with her when she’s decided to paint her skin. He’s always deemed it a private affair that he shouldn’t intrude on. Tattoos are personal. They become a part of a person, and she of all people has held those parts close to her chest.

She doesn’t mean to invite him. It’s just that...she really doesn’t have any idea what she’s going to get. She desires an inking to paint her as much pirate as the rest of her crew. Her swan may hold that meaning to most, but David’s the only one who truly knows what it means to her. Not pirate, but an identity free of the shackles of their former life. This desire to be a part of her crew, not just its captain, has been building for a long time. She doesn’t try to focus on why, but the loneliness overcomes her reluctance to self-analyze. She wants to be a part of something. Not held above it, but within it.

Sometimes, she watches them joke and revel with each other, but she feels so distant from it all even when she’s laughing along with them, and she wants to feel _there_ with them, not alone in her own thoughts. She left that darkened isolation and thought herself finally free, but it’s creeping on her. The darkness. The isolation.

She refuses to go back.

She steps with an urgency towards the local artist. David hurries after her, but thankfully doesn’t say a word about her quickened pace.

Although, he does grab her back when they get to the dirt road leading out of town. She always notes her surroundings, painfully aware of everything and everyone that would seek to harm her and her own, so she already noted the cart stuck in the mud hole. She was pretty fine with ignoring it. They’re less likely to draw unfriendly attention if they keep to their destination, but David’s ever the hero. She expects nothing less of him, but can’t help the groan when her shadow takes the lead and jogs over to the stuck cart.

“Don’t want to get mud on this,” David says, raising his ringed finger.

He slips it off his pinky, the ring too small to fit on any of his other fingers but too precious to risk holding anywhere else. He keeps it always in sight just as he keeps his mother ever in his heart.

She aches for him, at his loss, just as she aches for herself, having never had anyone to lose.

He slides the ring into his pocket and gets to work help trying to dig the wheel out of the mud hole. She thinks to offer her help as well, but before she can, a dark haired woman approaches.

“Do you need a hand with that?” she asks, placing her own on David’s shoulder.

It’s an innocent enough touch that she is immediately suspicious. The woman is slight, and although she knows strength is deceptive in the forms it takes, she really doesn’t think the brunette be much help in getting the cart out. More likely a distraction. She’s beautiful, and David may never have sought companionship out, but he still has eyes, and an unfortunate habit of becoming a bit lost around pretty women.

She reaches for the woman and draws her back before David can look up and reply.

“I think he’s got it,” she tells her.

The woman stares at her a moment, a bit wide eyed and maybe a little afraid and she smiles to try and ease the woman’s fear, but it doesn’t really seem to work because she nods and steps away.

“Alright.” The brunette bites her lip. “I’ll be going then.”

She nods and dismisses the woman, but eyes her as she quickly moves towards the forest. The helpful brunette pulls her green cloak over her head, almost blending in with the land before she disappears within it.

David and the driver get the cart free after a few more minutes of struggle. The driver thanks him profusely and she rolls her eyes, grabbing David by the collar.

“He’s happy to have helped, but we have something to attend to. We’ll be taking our leave now,” she says.

The driver swallows at her look and gives his thanks again before trundling further into town.

“Swan,” David chastises.

She shrugs.

She starts back on their path, but finds David isn’t following her. She turns to look at him, and his expression is at once ashen and utterly pissed, a sight she truly has never seen on him.

“My ring is gone,” he says and turns back to the mud hole.

He looks wildly about, so she grabs him before he can start a desperate digging in the mud.

“Let’s go,” she says, following the woman’s path out of town.

She starts at a run that David quickly surpasses. He used to be a shepherd, so he has skill tracking lost animals which translates to finding lost people well. He finds the woman’s path faster than Emma does, and although she tries to keep pace, he winds his way through the trees and she quickly loses him in them.

She stops in her futile run, and waits for sound to follow. The snapping of tree branches takes her north, a woman’s shout takes her east, and David’s shouting takes her to where he’s scrambling to his feet, blood sliding free of a wound on his cheek, sword planted firmly in the ground before him.

“I will find you,” he mutters to himself, not yet noticing her until she snaps her fingers.

“How did she get the better of you?”

She doesn’t go on about how it makes very little sense since the woman had no weapon on her, unless she picked one up that she had secreted in the growth. Still, David had prowess with a sword that she’s still trying to surpass, and the woman’s wrists were delicate, her muscles undefined from what she could see of them.

David’s expression goes red this time, and he says haltingly, “I - I had her, but she...uh...she.”

He scrubs his hand through his hair, pulling his lips into his mouth and she near laughs when she realizes.

“She didn’t.”

He looks at her then and sees the knowledge on her face and sighs, “Yeah, she did.”

If there were just anger and hurt in his expression at his loss, she would’ve left it at that. But he answers her with wonder in his words, and his gaze flickers off into the direction the woman apparently went, searching her out in the trees.

“Was it nice?” she asks.

“Huh?”

“Was the kiss nice?” she reiterates.

He places his hands on his hips and says, “Well, I was caught off guard by it, and she hit me in the face with a rock right after.”

For the third time, she asks, “Was it nice?”

His mouth almost quirks in a smile, and he looks back again before turning to her.

“Yeah, it was?” he says, a question in his words that she cannot be the one to answer. That he’s even seeking one makes her grab his wrist and tug him after her.

“Wait -” he says, looking back this time with a returned awareness and desperation.

“You don’t have to find her,” she explains. “She’ll find you.”

“Wait, what?”

“Come on. Chasing after a thief in the forest when it’s getting dark is only going to get us fucked, and I need a drink.”

She looks him up and down, lingering on the cut on his chin. The bleeding is slowing to a light trickle but since he wiped some of it away on his sleeve, he hasn’t made another move to clean it. The wound forgotten when it should only make his chase more urgent.

“You need a drink,” she states.

He follows after her, so quiet that she’s afraid she’s lost him. But when she finally drags him through the tavern doors and gets a look at him in the dim light, he just looks lost.

She gets them settled just away from the revelry of their crewmates and two drinks on their table before he says, quietly morose, “It was all I have left of her.”

Her heart twinges. She looks towards the door of the tavern as it opens, but it’s only a burly looking sailor. Her heart speeds in a way it didn’t when she dragged David from his hunt. Her gut instinct has so successfully kept her guts within her body that she trusts it implicitly, but this is the first time she’s felt it could be wrong.

The first time it’s ever truly mattered that it could be wrong.

Her two drinks disappear down David’s throat and she orders two more, the night drawing later and later. She doesn’t touch those two either, keeps her head steady and her gaze locked firmly on the door.

It isn’t the door that she catches her in, but her head peeked through the open window. She sees the movement and turns just in time to catch the woman’s guilty eyes. They widen when the brunette sights her, but she nods to keep the woman in her place.

_Stay or I’ll make you pay._

She heeds the order, and steps away from the window frame, leaning against the outer wall. Through the window, she watches the woman fidget and could laugh at this the way she laughed at David, but she saves it until she’s certain, until her gut instinct proves itself true.

“Come on,” she commands just as David’s about to swallow down yet another ale. She’s glad she stuck to the softer stuff or he’d be under the table by now. Still, he has to lean on her slightly when they make their way to the door, and he does protest in the way drunks do when taken away from their vice.

“Swan, I just -”

Whatever he _just_ was going to say is lost to the sight of the brunette leaning against the wall. She jumps off it as she sees him, and she’s probably expecting some kind of vicious rage, but the woman doesn’t know David the way that she does.

Although, by the way she stares at him, that same wonder in her eyes as were in David’s words, she thinks that the brunette wants to.

She reaches into her pocket, pulling out the pouch she’d stolen off of David. She pours it into her hand, the ring falling into her open palm. She picks it up gingerly and steps towards David.

Glancing away as he looks at her, she says, “I didn’t think it would matter, but it really matters to you, and I…”

She trails off, her unsaid words easy to translate. There is a still a depth to them besides her simple understanding, one that only David and the woman know.

“I don’t know what to say,” David says when the thief gets within arm’s reach of him. He takes a step closer, and then another until they’re close enough for him to kiss her again. He reaches up and touches his jaw and says, “I think it’s going to scar.”

“Sorry,” the woman says. She grabs his hand and drops the ring into it, folding his fingers closed around it. “That’s kind of what happens when a guy comes at you with a sword. You have to improvise.”

They both laugh together, a tension eased and another one growing, so much softer than the first.

Gut instinct proven true, she starts to walk away to the leave the pair to it. David’s voice carries after her, and she listens for any sign that he’s too drunk to protect himself, but his words surprise her.

“This was my mother’s ring. Her wedding ring. It was all she had left of my father when he passed. She gave it to me one night. We were just talking over dinner and she was fiddling with it on her hand, and suddenly she took it off and told me that she wanted a wonderful future for me. One full of love and possibility. She told me that true love follows this ring wherever it goes. She had it with my father, with me, and she wanted me to have it. I thought she was just trying to get me to see that selling the farm would bring me better opportunities. She’d been trying to convince me of that for a while. But it was two days before the sickness became visible, another two before she was so lost in the delirium that she couldn’t even see me before her. She told me she loved me before she died, but I’m still not sure if the words were meant for me or for someone only she could see.”

For the first time, she realizes that David doesn’t need tattoos to hold the parts of himself that mattered to his chest. She turns back and watches him fiddle with the ring. He doesn’t see her, his eyes fixed on the woman’s.

This time, she does leave them to it.

She ends up at the docks, but doesn’t board her ship, choosing to rest at an empty slip. It gives her a clear glimpse at the water beyond. She doesn’t know when it looks more beautiful, when the sun’s reflecting color off it, or when its depths are darkened by the illumination of the moon.

In this light, she cannot see her own reflection.

More time than she can count later, a hand comes to rest on her shoulder. She heard the steps approach, but they’re of a familiar gait so she didn’t even turn around until he drew her attention.

David helps her to her feet and says, “I think we got distracted from our purpose.”

She raises a brow until he starts to lead her down the roads, and she remembers. That tattoo. They’re standing outside the parlor when he finally speaks again.

“I think I have a problem.”

She smiles. “I know.”

For a long moment, he doesn’t move after her when she enters the parlor. She’s called over the tattooist and is unlacing the back of her shirt by the time he joins her.

“You _know_?” he asks.

It must be the ale making him so dumbfounded. Sober David would know that his feelings are obvious to anyone with eyes. True love follows his ring wherever it goes, and the only person he’s ever told that is a woman he’s known for less than a day, who stole from him and near knocked him out with a rock. If the reason she came into this parlor was to feel less lonely, then she surely has succeeded.

She looks back at David.

He’s smiling.

His happiness is a disease impossible to fight.

“It’s cute,” she says.

David’s gapes like...a fish, sounds about right. She fights off a smile, but she must be unsuccessful because he narrows his eyes.

“Well, didn’t you come here to do something?” he snaps.

She did. Reminded of this, she bares her back completely and points the tattooist to mark her from her neck to her shoulder, her neck to the center of her shoulder blades. David watches over her as the tattooist inks her to her instruction.

“Crossed swords? Suits your combative nature.”

She can’t glare at his face, so she passes over the empty objection and says, “I wanted something to commemorate this.”

“Commemorate what?”

“You, meeting your true love.”

He’s the one to object at that, but it’s colored with more emotion than irritation. When the ink is drying on her skin, he wraps her in a hug, cradling her head to his chest.

“We leave tomorrow at daybreak,” she says in reply.

Their crew is one person greater when they leave port, and her heart is less lonely.

She is a part of something.

She is...more than what she thought she could be.

 

**V** -

The tavern is as most taverns are, loud enough to hide the drab walls, stocked enough to lessen the risk of its patrons truly seeing themselves. It’s a terrible place for him to be, to be sure, but it’s exactly what he needs at the moment.

His horse is exhausted from the day’s ride, and Killian’s hungry and badly in need of a drink. Even water would do at this moment, and he trusts the stuff as much as he trusts the people in here not to drink themselves stupid. As much as he trusts himself not to drink himself stupid - normally. If he were home, it wouldn’t be so much of a danger. Perhaps, a tale his brother would not want to be shared, but not the risk this would involve.

He may have secured the continued alliance between his kingdom and this one, but that security could be easily broken by a slip-up. The Queen’s confidant, the Lady of the Green may be thankful for Killian’s flirtations, but those flirtations only lead to her reigniting her marriage - sex born of jealousy is exactly what it needed, and she just _loves_ her husband so much and she’s quite willing to prove it. Those flirtations yielded positive results. Any here might yield something worse.

Killian made his promises when he decided to take his own path home that he wouldn’t bring catastrophe down upon them. The King, who sometimes deems to be his brother, didn’t resort to begging to obtain said promise, but words more pointed.

“Little brother, I’m trusting you with this.”

He may value his drink, but he values his brother’s trust more. He can be a disappointment but he would never risk being a hardship. Liam believes in him; he could never take that for granted. His people believe in him as well - the royal that is truly of and for the people, as open to mistake as them - and he would not see them harmed for his follies.

He knocks his hook on the wood to gain the bartender’s attention, and once paid for, he takes the drink to a table shadowed enough not to draw attention. Perhaps a passing glance, but no more than that unless the patron is particularly drunk and looking for a fight. A single figure is usually too much to pass up. The pattern always seems to hold true whether said single figure is Killian or someone else that Killian always steps in to assist.

The light in this corner is not bright, but it glints off his hook. The appendage is so much more comfortable than the one he wears at home. A wooden hand is no more use than a lost one - except the lost one at least is to be acknowledged and not hidden as if in shame. He feels the pretender when he dresses up at court, his loss hidden behind gloves and careful handling of the world around him. The hook is a freedom that he isn’t often allowed.

These little moments of true freedom are so hard to come by, and he perhaps should be ashamed to admit that above his brother, above his kingdom, this is what prevents him from risking anything. He would not cut this freedom short.

He’s had a plate set before him, cleared it, and had two ales before he thinks to give the tavern more than a simple survey. It’s become fuller and louder, and if he’s to get any rest, he’ll have to find other accommodations. Perhaps something closer to the dock, where all is quiet at this time of night, all the sailors in here and nothing but the sea lapping against the land to cut the silence.

He drops his gaze back to the table, about to stand when a figure passes close by his table and he prepares himself to draw that attention he’s so carefully avoided this whole time.

Instead, the man stumbles past to the bar, and Killian’s gaze falls across the tavern, and falls on _her._

She’s beautiful, but it isn’t the first thing he notices about her, which is quite unlike him. He’s a great fan of beauty; loves it, even, though his brother would like him to love it a little less - or at least, more discreetly.

He’d be happy to know that Killian is attempting that at the moment because she’s beautiful, but she’s also dangerous. More than the armed and tattooed men and women around her speak of. She could kill him certainly, and it’s highly likely she would if she knew who he was, but he’d look forward to that death if only to give him a moment around her.

That’s what he notices. She’s dangerous, but she’s truly a danger to him.

His brother would be less than thrilled by his decreasing discretion, and utterly disappointed by his disregard for self-preservation for Killian watches her openly. She’ll acknowledge the look soon. At the moment, she’s sipping at whatever she keeps in the little black flask and deciding whether he’s a threat or just a very stupid admirer.

Perhaps a bit of both.

Apparently decided, she lifts her gaze to his. She slips her flask into the pocket of the blonde man beside her. He looks at her briefly and sighs wearily, expectant of the way she ignores him and leaves the table. Her eyes don’t leave Killian except to offer a smirk to the men she steals drinks from.

She seats herself across from Killian at the table and slides one of the drinks over to him.

He lifts it, gets a whiff of strong liquor before the rum slides over his tongue, the burn familiar as he swallows. She lowers hers a beat after he lowers his, and licks the rum off her bottom lip. It’s a seduction, of course, but it’s also an appraisal.

He must seem worth her time because she says, “Most men usually don’t stop at staring at me.”

“Most men are quite eager to meet their deaths, then,” Killian replies.

Her mouth purses in an attempt to fight a smile. Killian wishes she wouldn’t fight it because he’s certain it’s a remarkable sight. She lifts her drink again to cover herself. He hasn’t yet earned the smile.

“Are they?” she asks.

“Aye,” he replies, not simply in the confirmation of the men that would see her as eager for their attentions.

She considers him thoughtfully. A silence passes between them, and it’s tense in only that it is intense, her gaze affixed to his. He thinks her eyes remind him of the forests he used to roam in, all that space hiding so many secrets beneath the undergrowth. He’d used to seek them out, paths to fairy glades and the hideouts of beast and beauty alike. She looks like a moss covered pond, her hair the dust of gold sunlight peeking through the trees. Her lips are the pink of roses he couldn’t bring himself to pick, even with the beautiful lass beside him, huffing expectantly for following him out this far. There’s a few freckles dotting her skin, and they’re the dark sand leading out into the open sea.

Her gaze flickers from his first - and it’s just as he thought, she is not simply beautiful or dangerous. She is as the forest is to him, as the sea is, as every place he’s been and has never been: a mystery worth exploring.

“Are you eager to meet your death?” she asks.

Killian smiles, “Death is an end. I’d like to keep going a little longer.”

“Going where?”

He sighs. “Wherever I can.”

“You can’t go as far as you wish, can you?”

Her question is too pointed. He smiles past the revelation, and says, “To the ends\ of the world? To the end of time? No, I cannot go so far as that.”

She nods after a beat.

He hasn’t fooled her.

It’s a touch disconcerting to be read like this when he’s usually the one seeing people as open books whose pages he can flip with ease. But more so, terrifyingly so, it’s _nice_ to be so revealed. To be unable to hide behind easy jokes and flirtations.

Perhaps, he’s found a kindred spirit.

“And where would you like to go?” he shoots the question back.

She replies, “Nowhere at all. I’m quite content where I am.”

She flutters her eyelashes at him and her smile would be a gift if it wasn’t so manufactured. She’s trying to hide, too, and it aches to see past that. She’d like to go someplace, but she’s going nowhere. For someone who seems as free as her, it’s a wonder that she feels just as stuck as him.

“As am I,” he agrees.

She holds his gaze again, and yet again, she is the first to look away. It only makes her easier to read. The open collar of her shirt reveals lines leading down her back, an image he can only guess at when she’s so hidden. Her shirt is unbuttoned, but just enough that he can see the hint of cleavage beneath it. A dusting of freckles on her chest that he’s sure cuts a soft path all the way down.

“I feel like you’re trying to decipher just how much of me you can get away with staring at before I knock you unconscious,” she comments.

“Actually, no, I was not, but for curiosity’s sake, how much is that? A few minutes?” He leans across the table, lowering his voice. “Hours?” His dimples flash as she blinks at him, something like surprise on her face. His voice is a near whisper, then. “Days?”

She leans closer, too, and says, “You don’t have days, and you wouldn’t last that long even if you did.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” he says. “I love a challenge.”

“I’m sure you do, but you’re too used to winning to recognize when you’ve already lost,” she says.

He reaches out his hook and she freezes, but only until he merely brushes her a golden tress behind her ear. Then she just rolls her eyes.

“Perhaps this battle. But I am willing to have another go at it,” he says.

“You don’t know when to quit, do you?”

“I actually do, which is why I’m still here.”

She concedes to this with a smile, a real one this time, and it catches the words in his throat, captures his heart in mere seconds. He feels her smile squeeze it tight and hold it as long as it lasts, and even after, when he can still see its remnants on her face, her dimples softened but still there.

Where all his other stares had her rolling her eyes or meeting him with a sharp retort, this one makes her tremble just the slightest that he wouldn’t notice had he not been staring. That she wouldn’t have felt if he hadn’t been staring.

She draws back in her seat and swiftly stands up. She doesn’t look at him for a moment, and he senses a dismissal incoming, so the question she poses instead is much unexpected.

“Would you like to be somewhere else?”

“Anywhere,” he answers without thought.

He stands from his seat, making only a stop at the lass who served him. He presses five gold pieces in her hand. She smiles her appreciation, her gaze appreciative as well, but he finds _her_ in the doorway of the tavern and that’s all the lass’ look can be, appreciation, when she’s out there waiting for him.

She sees when he sets out towards her, and steps out into the night. Her pace is slow enough that it’s easy for him to catch up to her. He gets a better picture of the lines leading down her neck, then, but it still isn’t a complete one.

Still a mystery that he wants to unwrap - and he finds, reveal to his eyes and his eyes alone.

She doesn’t say anything at all as she leads him, and his brother would say that he doesn’t know when to shut his mouth, but he recognizes a silence that should not be broken, a spell being cast and he’d lose the magic should he interfere.

The street she leads him down is secluded, and when she turns and presses him up against the wall, at first he thinks that it’s a quick and dirty fuck she’s looking for - which is disappointing - but then the shadows shift and he gets a clear view of her face.

She’s dangerous, a danger to him, and she looks like death staring him in the face, too beautiful to resist.

He feels a dagger press to his belly and she steps back enough to trail it up to his throat. He gets the _point_.

“I know who you are, and you’re pretty good at this game but even a pretty royal with pretty words isn’t going to get the better of me. Do I look like an idiot to you? You’re a hell of an idiot if you think I’m anything like you.”

She spits the last part, and the part of him not focused on the threat of her blade, recognizes the revelation in her words. She thought she found a kindred spirit, too.

With her knife still pressed to his throat, she grabs his hook. Deftly, she twists it until it frees from its brace. She tucks the hook securely on her belt.

“I think you’ve gotten the wrong impression, love.”

She snorts.

“Prince Killian, right? You’re far from home, aren’t you? Heard you were in this kingdom, but I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to traverse it alone.”

“I’m not alone, am I?” he says, softer than the situation warrants, but with just as much heat behind it. “I’m with you.”

She blinks, her expression unguarded until the snarl steps in to hide the astonishment.

“You are,” she agrees firmly. Her dagger presses just short of breaking his skin. “You’d bring me a hefty ransom.”

“Am I truly worth the trouble?” he asks.

Her expression softens for longer than it did before. Her mouth trembles, and he sees the moment she bites the inside of her cheek too hard because she flinches and the dagger slips down his throat.

“You’re right. I don’t need to gold. All I want is my freedom,” she says.

He forces himself not to agree. That’s something he can give her, but not something she can give him. He wouldn’t place that impossible hope on her shoulders.

She relinquishes the blade, draws it back and tucks it into her belt beside his hook. He has his own sword at his waist, and this is the perfect opportunity to turn the tables on her, but he isn’t worth the trouble for her, and she isn’t worth the trouble he would bring down on her.

“Don’t follow me,” she says.

She starts to walk, and he sighs heavily. She freezes mid step at that, and he stares at her back, at the dark lines on her neck leading to places he will never see. She starts walking again, and he watches her form, leading down a path he can’t follow.

He turns in the opposite direction, back towards the tavern. She’s headed to the docks so his ideas about finding accommodations down there is out of the question. Even if he kept to that plan, he wouldn’t find sleep. Not with her on his mind.

He didn’t even get her name, although he can hazard a guess.

And then he can confirm the truth when he’s about to turn down a street and hears the unsheathing of swords. The group moves towards the docks, and he steps out behind them, just far away enough not to be noticed, but close enough to see them. The Merchant Company likes their mercenaries to wear their insignia so when they execute their enemies, it sends a message that they aren’t to be messed with.

So far they haven’t had much success in executing Captain Swan, but it’s clear that they aren’t giving up. Piracy is a crime to be decried, truly, but slavery is one far worse. His brother and their kingdom don’t deal with any of the Company, which makes trade more difficult than it is for other kingdoms, but keeps their hands clean of that atrocity.

He hasn’t given it much thought besides pride at his brother for not engineering the continued trade of human beings, but he’s never come close to the realities of it. Of the people scarred by its practice and turning to their only recourse against it.

That pride feels empty now. They’ve washed their hands clean of the muck when they should be washing the muck clean instead.

He wastes very little time in following after them, but it’s still not enough to meet them before they meet her. They’re not paying much attention to their backs, too focused on Swan, which is extremely helpful in incapacitating the two standing at the back, watching until they’re needed.

It’s easy to get into the fight despite his body’s long disuse. Muscle memory, or just the desire to help her drawing the motions free from where he’s kept them hidden.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she shouts over the clash of blades, and her voice is a mixture of annoyed and surprised enough that he knows the words are meant for him.

“What does it look like?”

“But why the fuck would you want to?”

“Because you need help, of course.”

“First of all, no, second of all, you’re the one who needs _serious_ help, Prince.”

The back and forth takes them through all of the men save for two, one of which manages to trip her up, leaving her lying helpless in the street, her sword just out of reach and his raised towards her. Killian simply reacts, the one focused on him dead before Killian’s brain catches up – and when it does, his sword is buried in the back of the mercenary who knocked her to the ground.

Finally, he replies, “Aye, Captain, I’ll attend to that after I’m done saving your life.”

He pulls his blade free of the man above her, and he topples. Swan moves just in time to not be crushed by the dead weight. There’s blood staining her cheek and painting her throat red, but she’s unhurt, so her silence can only be because of him.

He leaves his sword out of its sheath. He’ll make a run down to the docks to wash it clean. For the moment, he presses himself back up against the wall of the building behind him and catches his breath, feels his disused muscles already wincing.

“Prince,” she calls to grab his attention.

He looks at her and she slips the hook free of her belt. He catches it when she tosses it to him - which was pretty stupid on both their parts as if she was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill himself tossing the sharp appendage around without thought.

He grins at the shared idiocy, and says, “You could have given me the hook sooner. It would’ve saved us a bit of trouble.”

Swan gives him a look so unimpressed that he wonders if he really _is_ that unimpressive. But she sighs, and with a slight frown, she offers, “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he says.

He closes his eyes, expecting to hear her footsteps moving away from him, but they move towards him and when he opens his eyes, she’s standing before him.

She waves her hands at the dead mercenaries all around them, and says, “You should get the hell out of here. Tell them you were attacked by pirates or whatever.” She purses her lips together, visibly considering her words. “I don’t want to cause an incident or bring trouble on your name and your kingdom.”

It’s practical and exactly what he needs to do. He promised Liam he would do exactly this. In the eyes of practicality, it was folly to chase after her, but in his eyes, it was the only thing to do. It still is. The only thing he can do.

That she would care to protect him and his kingdom - it only makes sense. Captain Swan _cares_. She wouldn’t be out here if she didn’t.

She wouldn’t still be beside his side if she didn’t.

He reaches out with his hand this time, licking his thumb first before he swipes at the light droplets of blood on her cheek. They give way to his touch, but there’s a red still left behind - more pink, and blooming beneath her skin.

It’s a good look, and although his thoughts pass over what it might look like all over her skin, they stop at that. She was right. They don’t have days. Not even hours. Minutes perhaps, where he can still stare at her this openly and she lets him.

He shifts to the side slightly, and his shoulder bumps against a windowsill. He looks at it, surprised to find a planter on the sill of what is obviously not a home. Someone down here cares, too, for the simple beauties of the world.

A bunch of buttercups peek out of the soil. Carefully, Killian plucks one, and turns to Swan. He offers it to her.

She stares at him in absolute confusion and the way her brow scrunches as she tries to decipher the offering makes him smile. He spends so much time smirking that the motion feels as disused as his swordsmanship.

She looks at him, posing the question with the soft greens of her eyes.

“It’s a thank you, Captain. For letting me save your life.”

She shakes her head again, and he can see through the unimpressed expression this time, can see the dimples just begging to be deepened with a smile. She takes the flower, and tucks it within her shirt.

She lingers even though he knows that the minutes are winding down to zero.

“Nice to meet you, Captain Swan,” he says, giving her the way out.

She doesn’t take it, which surprises him. She bites her lip, her brow furrowed in conflict. Closing her eyes, she takes a deep breath, and then roots him with her gaze.

“It’s Emma,” she states.

“Huh?”

This time, she says it quieter, mouth twisted up in half a smile and tight tension in her brow. She ducks her head just a bit, and repeats in a voice that sounds disused to the phrase, “My name is Emma.”

He stops just short of grabbing her hand and kissing her knuckles the way he might during the introduction of a noble lady and common lass alike. It wouldn’t be a shallow enough touch if he laid it on her. It would be too much for this moment.

Perhaps another moment.

“Until we meet again, _Emma_ ,” he says.

She snorts at that, and the tension leaves her, replaced with a nervous energy. She shakes out her hands, releases the cricks from her neck, and sighs.

“Right, _Killian_ ,” she replies like she doesn’t believe him.

He catches her eyes after, choosing not to hide. It’s nice to be so revealed, and it’s perfect, that look on her face when she realizes that “again” isn’t a possibility, but a promise.

The smile starts, but he never sees its end because she turns and hurries down towards the docks. Her smiles squeezes his heart tight, and doesn’t let it go.

-

The tattoo is as spur of the moment as the last, which it should be thankful for because if she’d given herself time to think it through, it would never be given life in thin black ink on the inside of her wrist, yellow petals - it had to be _yellow_ \- and a stem without an end. She nearly lets it wind around the inside of her arm, but thought catches her then and she blanches.

She pays the tattooist probably more than she should, but she does break his needle and probably scares him half to death, so her charity is appreciated, probably.

She thought the only way she’d glimpse royalty would be at the sharp end of her sword. Perhaps run through their belly. Perhaps held to their throat as they surrendered.

Her imagination simply hadn’t figured in him, and his stupid flower. Its long since wilted and been tossed to the sea, but now it blooms again, on the inside of her wrist.

She is -

_Emma_ is an idiot.

 

**VI** -

Emma finds the place by accident. They’re in the port only to restock. They’ve been here before, and it’s comfortable because they’ve never gotten any trouble from the locals. In fact, they’ve been lauded as heroes instead.

It happens more and more lately. People like seeing their loved ones freed and brought home to them.

Home.

It isn’t on Emma’s mind when she finds the place, but she poses the question around town - who lives here? Who owns it? Is it for sale?

All questions answered and she has the key to the house in her hand. It’s a small place, and definitely needs to be worked and reworked and shaped up into someplace remotely livable, but - well, she’s thinking about it as a livable place and that’s where she gets in trouble.

Snow finds out first. David’s been less her shadow lately. He and Snow take turns, and sometimes - _blissful_ times - they leave her be. Emma assumed this was one of those times, but when she steps outside the house, staring at the blades of the key and winding lines at its opposite end, Snow is waiting with a careful look on her face that is more worrisome than any smile or upbeat line about hope and happy endings has ever been.

“You bought a house, Captain,” Snow says simply.

It isn’t a question. It isn’t even a gentle probing. Simply a statement of the obvious.

It’s exactly what Emma doesn’t need. She can handle questions and probing because she’s used to it. Simple acknowledgement is -

(It reminds her of him.)

“My name,” Emma starts. She breathes through her nose. “My name is Emma.”

“Really?” Snow considers this, and then says, “Do you know what Emma means?”

Emma shakes her head in the negative.

“It means whole. Universal.” Snow looks at Emma, down to the key she’s fiddling with in her hands, and the house behind her. “You’re everything you want to be, you know. If you want to be Emma, you should be Emma.”

(He’s the first person she ever told her name. To him, she is Emma, and it - it’s everything she wants to be.)

Snow murmurs, “I know that look.”

She doesn’t say what look that is. She doesn’t have to. Between her and David, if one doesn’t say it, the other is there to spell it out.

Emma’s at the tattooist again. This one’s her favorite, perhaps because her conversation is the only one that’s never annoyed her. She never thought she’d enjoy hearing about a little boy’s antics, running about the forest like he owns it simply because his father used to run wild in them as well. She thinks it helps that she’s met the boy - Roland - and he’s everything Marian describes him as, and so much more.

Utterly adorable. Emma never had that thought until Roland smiled at her.

David stands behind her, humming something that he no doubt picked up from Snow. She has a tune for each day of the week, every hour, and possibly every minute.

The inking is almost complete, an endeavor that’s taken hours because of its intricate design and Marian’s insistence that she take breaks despite how used to pain Emma is; it doesn’t mean Marian is willing to foist more on her.

The statement is strange. Marian’s sincerity is even stranger.

Marian’s on the blades when David says, “Snow says you’re in love.”

Emma jumps, the needle skids and she would strangle David, but Marian places her hand on Emma’s shoulder and says, “David, you’re ruining my hard work.”

“I’m not in love,” Emma says petulantly.

She isn’t.

“I know that look,” David says. He hums again, and then adds, “Perhaps I should get the tattoo this time. Just for you and…?”

“And no one.”

“And the mysterious No One.”

She’d kill him; she would, but Marian’s hard work has already been marred. She’ll save it for later.

Later comes and goes, and Emma forgets as she refocuses her attention on finding the material and workers needed to fix her house. It leaves them in port for far longer than usual, but with the people here not exactly eager to spread the news of Captain Swan and her crew hanging about, it is almost...an idyllic experience. She spends a lot of time looking over her house, but even more time just walking past where the port ends to the dark sand of the beach. She takes her boots off, even leaves her sword belt unattended when her feet lead her under the bright blue water. The waves feel good lapping her legs, and the sea has never looked as beautiful as it does when she’s not being hunted on it.

Her pants are rolled up to her thighs when she realizes she’s not alone. She turns quickly, her sword belt out of reach and her body weighed down by the sea and the sand and -

Weighed down by his appearance.

The wind whipping through his hair - it’s longer than when she saw it in that dark tavern, so much messier - makes him look flustered. He keeps his hands resting on his thighs as he stares at her. She’d expect him to say something; he definitely talks too much...definitely.

He says nothing, but he stares at her and it says everything.

_Until we meet again_.

_Emma_.

“We can’t be like this,” Emma says.

“Like what?”

“Like…”

She doesn’t know quite how to finish that sentence, leaves the word hanging, as unsure as she is in her hesitant steps towards him. His eyes widen slightly and he swallows hard enough that she can see it.

“Like this?” Killian says.

She lifts her hand towards him and he raises his as well, drawing them so close that they meet halfway, the tips of his fingers gently brushing her open palm. It leaves a mark there, she’s sure of it, because she can feel a lighting where his path treads, heat flaring and spinning rapidly out of control.

She feels it low in her belly and sinking further, the familiarity comforting when she feels the heat in her chest, like her heart is on fire and not even if she stepped into the sea before her would she be able to quench the flame.

Gods, she cannot feel like this. Fucking Snow and fucking David, and her own fucking self for becoming this.

Becoming -

Emma.

Emma used to yearn for a home. For a family. For love. Emma felt abandoned and lost, but Emma also felt like she could be found. Someday by someone, and Emma was lost to girl to slave to Captain Swan to these years spent chasing revenge and trying to make a wound in them as deep as they made in her, deep enough to cut right through.

Emma was lost.

Emma _is_ found.

The people she has been cannot feel like this. They cannot clasp his hand in hers and drag him down to the sand. They cannot afford this moment of absolute freedom, from every chain, from every obligation, from every scar that she ever hid beneath the ink on her skin.

They cannot.

But they aren’t here. She is, and gods does it feel good to press her nose to the crook of Killian’s neck and feel him chuckle.

“We are going to be like this,” he says.

She draws back, giving him her best attempt at skeptical when she really, really wants to believe his words.

“You sound very certain.”

“Emma,” he says and all she hears is her name.

She kisses whatever else he’s going to say from his lips. It’s a soft thing that she’s not used to - not like this, at least. Cheek pecks from Snow and David don’t count. That one kiss from Red when they hid out in her Granny’s inn doesn’t count either, even though it was a soft thing born from unexpectedness rather than - rather than the way this one is born, from that small, secret part of her that believes him and believes in that “we are going to be like this” future where she can spend with him. She doesn’t appreciate the gentle touch of his tongue against her lips, seeking permission, and the way she tangles his hand with hers and squeezes, opening for him and finding that he doesn’t taste like rum or royalty (two very distinct tastes, one she knows, and one she doesn’t want to know). He tastes the way it first felt to stand on that deck without a command to steal her attention from the ebbing of the waves. He tastes like the burn of that first tattoo, its thick, dark band welcome. He tastes like some stupid prince rushing in to save her like her life actually mattered. Like some stupid prince staring at her when he should’ve kept his eyes to himself.

He tastes _stupid_ \- and she feels like a fool when she drags him closer, pulls back only to press her nose to his and pant against his lips. She traces the top of his with her tongue, and when he seeks her mouth again, she murmurs, “No.”

“No?” he asks, and he has no right to sound like that, struck dumb by their kiss.

It’s stupid. He should stop.

He presses close again, his lips against hers when he asks, “No?”

“Killian,” she says, hoping he’ll understand.

He does. Somehow, he does, and he draws back, scrambling to his feet and helping her do the same. Her wet legs are so sandy now that she’s going to have to shirk the pants entirely, wash them all the way through before she even thinks about stepping back into them. Risking sand in uncomfortable places is for people dumber than her.

“Stupid,” she mutters, swiping at her legs ineffectually.

“Is that directed at me?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Fine,” he says petulantly.

He brightens when she looks at him. He smiles, a little sheepishly, and he isn’t quite looking at her when he says, “I hear you’ve bought a house. The fearsome Captain Swan looking to settle down?”

She doesn’t get it, not at first. She raises a brow at him, red flooding her cheeks in embarrassment. His shoulders slump at that. He looks at her a moment before his head sinks, disappointment focused on the sand beneath his feet. No one should ever look that hurt over someone else buying a house - especially when they’re the one to blame.

“I’m looking to take a bath. I think they’ve installed some kind of magic heater thingy in my house. I don’t know. All I have to do is bring the water and it heats itself. It’s amazing.”

She’s rambling, she realizes at the same moment that he lifts his head grinning too wide, too happy. He offers her his hook, and she grabs it just as he starts to tug it back.

“Scared I’ll take it again?” she asks to let Killian cover his hesitation.

She sees his gratitude in his eyes as he shoots back, “Should I be?”

She doesn’t reply to that either.

“Show me the way,” he says.

Emma grabs her sword belt and her boots on the way off the beach. It’s cool enough out that she doesn’t bother putting on her shoes. The cobbles are warm, but they don’t burn her feet. Comfortable.

She winds her way through the streets quickly, taking a path that she normally doesn’t because she just isn’t ready for that right now. She isn’t sure she ever _will_ be, but that’s just what living with Snow and David is like.

Emma reaches underneath her shirt to pull off the necklace she carries her key on. She lets him go to unlock the door. It’s still a work in progress, but the dwarves Snow has befriended are nothing if not efficient. It’s bare, but completely functional. A bath, a bed, a closet, and a stove are all she really needs anyway. Everything else is just...extra.

She’s had less than enough. She’s had enough. Extra is something that she’ll have to grow accustomed to.

Emma looks at Killian as she throws her boots and belt down by the door. She’s glad she actually prepared herself for the possibility of sand because she has enough water in the house already that she doesn’t have to go out for it.

It’s also nice that she can strip out of her pants instead of spending another minute in them. He glances away as she does so, and she just laughs. Her shirt covers more than enough, but if he hasn’t come here expecting more than just the bare skin of her face, well, she’d be really surprised.

Amused, too.

“Help me with this water,” she tells him.

She heaves one bucket to the bath and he takes the other and she’s so happy to strip herself of her shirt that he doesn’t have the time to glance away when she does so.

His gaze starts to follow her curves, but while admiration is nice, the self-heating bath is much nicer. She steps into the water and sinks beneath. It’s so different from the rush of stepping into the sea. The sea is freedom in all its untamed glory. The bath is a conscious choice, water poured with a goal in mind, and that’s freeing too, to be able to choose the way the water moves around her.

She moans softly at the extremely welcome heat and turns to Killian, who’s staring at her like she’s the most interesting creature in the world. Or perhaps, just in this room, which isn’t hard. Again, it has the essentials but nothing to really make it -

Home.

She doesn’t want to look at him when she thinks about that, so she glances away and says, “You can make yourself comfortable instead of standing around looking awkward.”

Killian huffs, but takes her words as a challenge. She looks at him when she hears cloth hit the floor, and his hand is already working his belt free. She studies the corded muscles of his chest, but finds herself obsessed with his arms, which she gets the sudden urge to grab onto, feel the strength in them beneath her fingers, and drag him into the bath with her – and maybe just hold onto for a while after that.

His belt goes and he toes off his boots with an ease from practice. Emma ducks her head in laughter, and when she looks up his pants are halfway down his hips. He’s so concentrated on the action that she stares openly without fear of the heat of his eyes. Where she just wanted to grab his arms, now she just wants to crawl into his lap and ride him for hours.

She’s weak, and he’s stupidly attractive from head to toe. It’s really not that often she comes across that. Although Snow assures her that David is one of those few good men. Emma tries not to think about that, but since she is, it helps her drag her gaze away from him and return to the task at hand, enjoying her bath.

The heat of it is just a touch too warm now, and as she skims her hands down her body, they take on a mind of their own. Or Emma’s mind, just the parts that she’d really like to ignore until after she’s clean.

“Oh hell, I forgot the soap,” she says.

“Where?” he asks.

“In the bottom of the closet. There’s a box.”

She closes her eyes, and only opens them to a gentle touch at the top of her head. He offers her the soap with his hand and winds his hook through her hair which shouldn’t be as nice as it is, but it absolutely is. Nice.

“Thanks,” she says.

He plops down beside her bath, which Emma blanches at until she remembers the thick rug stretching from beneath the bath.

“Comfy,” he says, following her line of thought.

“I think a friend of Snow’s actually made it. Killed and skinned the bear himself.”

“A man of many talents,” Killian notes.

Normally, she’d spend as much time enjoying the warm water as she can before her skin starts to shrivel up, but the cleaning becomes cursory instead of leisurely. He’s staring at her, and she just really wants to kiss him. But as a clean Emma without sand in uncomfortable places.

Feeling cleanly, Emma drops the soap in the empty bucket and rises from the bath with very little preamble.

Emma steps out of the water, and grabs him, dragging him to his feet. She leads him backwards towards her bed, amazed that she doesn’t slip.

“Don’t you want to dry off first?” Killian asks.

“Not really,” she says and tugs him down with her.

It’s a bit of a battle to get him beneath her when he so obviously wants to be on top, but eventually he gives in, letting her suck a bruise into the delicate skin of his neck while she straddles him. Her fingers find his collarbones, nails dragging carelessly across them. It makes him shiver beneath her, his voice a rumble as he says, “Emma, I’ve been looking for you for too long to let you have your _very_ slow way with me.”

“I’m not hard to find,” she protests.

She rises slightly to push the wet hair out of her way and Killian takes that opportunity to cup her breast, kneading her softly and then firmly and then -

“Ah,” she gasps as his nail scrapes her nipple, and he follows it with a pinch between his thumb and forefinger, a tug that is all too much at once. She works herself lower so that she’s straddling him where she’s wet and warm, and extremely inviting - like she’s very open into him sinking deep so she can ride him the way she wants to.

He seems content just to skirt against her, rocking his hips away from her - which is totally contradictory to his earlier comment, so she’s forced to assume that he’d be happy to have _his_ very slow way with her, but she’s not allowed to do the same.

If it’s some kind of ranking thing, where he’s a prince and she’s just a captain of a ship, then he’ll just have to suffer lowering himself for her enjoyment.

(Maybe later he can truly lower himself for her enjoyment.)

(Definitely later she’ll do the same for him.)

She doesn’t think it’s that however. It’s too simple, and Killian is _stupid_ , but he is anything but simple. She kisses his jaw this time over and up, takes his earlobe just between her teeth and tugs until he groans. It’s a satisfactory sound, but Emma wants more.

She wants...extra.

She reaches one hand up to card her fingers through his hair, tugging lightly when he blinks up at her with too much emotion in his eyes. She’s had enough of the sea’s swirling depths today, washed her body clean of it. She doesn’t need to be bathed in it again.

Emma refuses to meet his eyes as his hand rolls her nipple again, a delighted laugh leaving him when she moans and arches into his touch.

She slaps Killian’s hand away when he tries it again, and tugs it over her hip to grasp her ass. He doesn’t realize what she’s doing until she leans back into his grip and finds a better angle, knees astride him and trapping him between her thighs, so when he rocks his hips this time, he brushes against her.

She’s wet, warm and inviting, and he accepts this time. Emma rolls her hips over him, coating his hard length in her wetness until he squeezes her ass hard, and she decides to take her very slow way with him buried inside her. She shifts more, lifting her knees from the bed to rest on her feet. She uses his thighs as leverage to move forward, and he’s helpful, hand caressing her skin and holding her up at the same time.

It surprises her a bit, the gentle way Killian’s fingers trail up her spine. His hand rests on the small of her back, where the key is still a little tender, and he holds her there, perhaps sensing there’s something special beneath his hand when she tenses, trying to control the shiver, but unable to do more than stop it from taking her thighs. It shakes her shoulders, makes her breasts rise and fall in a quick inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale - breathe, Emma, just breathe.

That would’ve been a helpful mantra if she hadn’t chosen that moment to wrap her hand around his cock. The weight of him feels so nice in her hand, and he’s so hard but silky, the skin soft in her palm as she pumps him with her fist.

It’s been...awhile, and she probably should’ve prepared herself first because ohfuckinggodsshitfucking _fuck_ does he stretch her when he works his way inside. It’s just the tip and she feels ready to die - her jaw clenched against the pleasure just on the edge of pain, and slowly tipping until -

He shifts them ever so slightly that she falls forward. She catches herself, one hand on his chest, the other on his shoulder. Her clit drags against him with his careful rocking, and she gets wetter, spreads more and the slide of him is easier now. The burn fades into a simmer, and then it’s just the heat of their joining that she feels, so full of him that fuck, she really has no idea how she’s handling it.

For the life of her, she can’t figure out when he’d slid so deep into her that he’s almost bottomed out. It feels like Killian more than just filling her - which makes no goddamn sense, because there’s no _more_ that he can be doing, it’s absolutely impossible and Emma’s _done_ the impossible, but that, that she could never do.

But it feels that way, like he’s every fucking where, and she has no place to go, can only spread wider and take it as he presses all the way in, nudging the very end of her. She gasps when she rocks backwards and finds that yes, the impossible is really happening, because she feels stretched beyond her limit and still she wants more.

More becomes Killian dragging out of her until he’s nearly left her entirely, and then driving back in, carefully, so carefully, until she starts to meet his thrusts and he picks up the pace, a hoarse moan wrenched from his throat, when she finally, _finally_ meets his eyes and sees just how wrecked he is by this, sweat beading his brow, which is set in a tense line of concentration that Emma can only translate as him trying not to lose himself inside her.

She shouldn’t push him, but she does. “Ple -” Her mouth feels dry, her voice cracked like she’s been screaming for hours and hours. She swallows and pushes through the desert in her throat to say, “Please. I need - more.”

Killian keeps drawing back until it’s just the head spreading her wide, but now he slams forward, jarring her with every thrust, so deep and hard and fuck, she asked for more, and he’s giving it, and she’s _giving_ \- giving in to the pressure building; she can’t control her breathing, and any helpful mantra has fallen so far by the wayside as to have never existed at all.

Emma can’t breathe.

“Stay with me, love,” she vaguely hears him say, voice strained and straining towards a break. She wants to heed his words, but she very much also wants to just fall apart. Her gasps aren’t making her breathing any easier, and she’s drifting, lost in the space between pleasure and pain and pleasure so heightened as to be a painful tearing at her already frayed nerves.

“Emma, please,” he begs and she’s pulled back down to earth, back down to where their bodies are joining, the slap of skin too loud when she’s making these sounds, high-pitched whimpers that she can’t control no matter how her new awareness of them makes her flush, more heat on her skin, and she can’t possibly manage to stop from burning up.

“I thought about this,” he says through grit teeth and a punishing pace. “Imagined the freckles dotting your breasts, whether they’d disappear beneath your blush, and I’m happy to _say_ ” - he punctuates this with a thrust that leaves her without words - “that they do not. That I get to see all your lovely shades.”

She makes no moves to cut his words short, because it’s pushing her right towards that relief that she needs.

“I tried not to think of how your eyes would darken when I finally buried myself in you, but I couldn’t and I can’t and I _won’t_ now that I’ve seen it.”

She moans, so close, so fucking close.

“Gods, when you said my name, all I wanted was to hear it over and over again. My name never sounded so -”

“Killian,” she says and falls apart, unable to ride him through her orgasm as she can’t ride the waves of blue in his eyes and she couldn’t ride out the patter of her heart when he handed her that damn flower.

He might say her name as he pushes as deep as he can, pulsing within her. He probably said it. She slides flat atop him, and feels his chest rise and fall in a familiar rhythm. He definitely said it, with the same note she said his, with that moment as clear in his eyes as this one.

She’s slick and dripping, but still it burns when he slides all the way out. The stretch was one thing, the ache of emptiness is another, her body realizing that perhaps it _shouldn’t_ have pushed itself so far.

But it did, and definitely will again. Sometime soon.

Killian pushes her off him, gently but the cool sheets beneath her heated skin makes her hiss, the rough texture of the fabric versus the smoothness of his skin just a little unwelcome.

She rolls over on her back and buries her face in the pillow, uncaring that she still can’t exactly breathe. Her pillow smells of the lavender spray that Snow says improves the healing effects of sleep, and she’s already halfway to dozing when he shifts beside her and presses his fingers to her back.

Her bed partners usually don’t get the chance to ask questions about her markings, let alone what Killian’s doing now, tracing his fingers over the raised skin, the scars hidden beneath the ink, and humming appreciatively. He doesn’t ask her for the stories behind them. Instead, he begins to tell one of his own - “This one,” he says of the crossed swords, “is how we met. I can still hear the clash of our steel ringing in my ears, you know.”

“Can you now? Might want to get that checked out,” she says, pressing further into the pillow as he glides his hand down her back, from the swords to the blades of the key. He finds the one spot where the lines aren’t completely neat and says, “Was this before or after we took that merchant ship in Misthaven? The one transporting squid ink?”

“After,” she says.

He hums. She frowns at the detail in that question, and turns to ask, but he presses right where the beak of the swan starts, and traces its wings, every intricately drawn feather, every inch she’s had to have inked over when a blade has split her open or debris has pockmarked her skin.

Killian wraps his hand around the first of her rings, and his thumb presses just a little too hard. She does turn to look at him, then, and part of her wishes she didn’t because his knowledge is written so clearly on his face - and he knows who she was, and she doesn’t want that identity attached to her anymore even though she knows she can no more leave that behind than leave herself. But it’s also reaffirming, to see her anger reflected in his eyes, proof that the experience that isolated her so severely hasn’t left her completely alone.

He’s more careful with the second line, and places a kiss on it, a story written in his eyes that she doesn’t know if she should ask. Maybe later.

She lifts her hand to push him away - “Enough exploring, I’m tired” - but it bares her wrist to his gaze.

He catches her hand in his, and angles her to get a better look at the tattoo. Suddenly shy, she doesn’t look at him as he rubs across it, making the pulse point jump beneath his hand. She finds safety in the pillow she’s buried her head in all this time.

Killian seeks her out, tucking the hair hiding her eyes behind her ear. She sighs, and lets him find her.

“And this one?”

“You tell me,” Emma whispers.

“I know a place you might like,” he answers.

“Where?”

“At the end of the world, a place lost in time,” he says.

He’s teasing, he is, but she hears what he doesn’t say. He can go as far as he wants now. She wants to know what changed. She wants to know why he smiles so easy, lying in her bed like he has nowhere else he ever has to be. She wants to know how they’re going to be like this, curling around each other in her bed, in her _home_ (she’s scared to look at him when she thinks about that, but she can’t look away). How are they going to get to the end of the world? To this place lost in time?

She has so many questions, and she wants to have all the answers, as many as he can give her and more.

He leans forward, pressing his head beside hers on her pillow. He inhales, no doubt recognizing the lavender in her pillow, and presses his nose to hers.

“We can go there if you like,” he offers.

She leans forward and presses her lips to his, not a kiss, but a promise of one.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

Emma rests her forehead on his, inhaling his exhale, their breaths a lullaby that she cannot resist.

Emma is -

Emma is dreaming only to wake to a dream far better.

 

**VII** -

It’s become painfully obvious - of which Snow and David are painfully obnoxious - that she’s finally, truly what she’s always wanted to be: free.

She doesn’t take either of them when she returns to Marian. She wants to do this alone, but a shadow settles in the doorway just as Marian’s outlining the shape, and it jolts her as it always does that she never has to be alone again.

Killian slumps into Marian’s favorite chair and she scoffs, “Royalty.”

He allows her the insult simply because of its hypocrisy - a former noblewoman telling off a former (though still current; Emma is still hazy on this part) prince for taking the best seat in the house.

Killian doesn’t ask what Emma is getting, which jolts her, too, that he likes to see her reveal herself layer by layer instead of tearing through in a quest for an answer.

He watches Marian outline, detail, and detail some more - the color coming last, before he speaks, “I’m glad we don’t have to go to the end of the world to see such beauty now.”

She smiles at him, although the tattoo stings as it always does. Marian pats her down carefully, and then places her between the two mirrors so she can gaze at the single Middlemist flower, its petals eternally in bloom.

Killian steps into the frame beside her, and Emma watches as he traces it so gently that she feels as if those truly are petals on her skin, requiring the most delicate of touches, the most caring of hands.

Killian presses closer, leaning into the crook of her neck so only she can hear his question, “Can we be like this?”

She turns into him, eyes fluttering shut just as her lips touch his.

“We are like this.”

Emma barely feels the touch of his hand and hook when she’s so lost in the touch of his lips, but when they finally break apart, she sees it, glittering in the mirror before her, shining bright on her finger.

He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses the ring, softly, with reverence, with gratitude, with everything that she is feeling but cannot give voice to as well as he could - although, he doesn’t give voice to it either, no words necessary, truly.

But wanted. Oh so wanted.

“I -”

_I love you. I am in love. I am_ -

She is not I. She is not Emma.

She is –

_We._


End file.
